L.R. Harvey Poetry

WAKING AT 29 Cannon fire of lamp click.  Toy kicked and battling every wall in the hall.  Who replaced these bare feet with concrete pavers?  Is it too loud a hope to creep quietly  across the living room  and figure some things out  in the light of the front  window before the house wakes? Too late: here come the hungry.  Lay out your queries  and whatever meager quarry you’ve gathered over the years like so many  pieces of peanut-butter bread and a smattering of goldfish.  This one will take a miracle.

THINNING This vegetable medley is to die for, a slow, contemplative death between my upper and lower molars. The tomatoes are the red red dreams of becoming, and the broccoli blossoms out like fireworks. For this vegetable medley, on this end of the harvest, I am nothing but grateful, if a bit, admitteldy, perplexed, for what to make of a gardener  who plucks the shoots  that did exactly as he asked them back in March, growing right where they were planted , their first true leaves opening to light as he pulls them up  and lays them down  to decompose as nutrients for others he’s deemed fit for the coming transplant? 

ANOTHER TRANSLATION Three smart men came  from the East to worship him,  and—their smarts falling from their pockets to take root in the manure, growing in that dark meadow into fodder for  the cattle—became wise.

POEM FOR NEARING 30 AND EVERY OTHER YEAR If you can pick your path through  the brambles crowding out  the narrow way down to the sinkhole, you may—if you keep your eyes  and other parts of you peeled— stumble upon the footprints  of the child who perpetually plays  in the creek bed. He’s out of earshot, meaning he won't come in when you holler to get cleaned up  for dinner, but he’s undoubtedly  there, hiding in the foliage  of every face, and you’ll know him  when you see him by the way  you find yourself humming lyrics in a language you didn’t know you knew  to the song he’s whistling,  the melody that makes  the earth ache for the green behind green, and flowers.     He sends sparrows skipping  across the sky with a wry smile  and a flick of his wrist, and long ago  he stopped asking what it means  and pushed back his desk,  disregarded the test, and walked through the gate of parted reeds, chin purple with blackberries. He’s baring himself now and looks your way, as if inviti

GREEN KNIGHT      — "A heavy, pressing errand takes me / To a place, somewhere, I don't know where / Or how to find it. But find it I will and / I must." What the green knight understood  is that in the glazed gaze of the living dead life is the ogre that kicks down your door with the soft thud of its bare feet. What the green knight knew is that to find the wildness  you’re searching for,   that tangled, real stuff that yanks you from  your stale festivities  with little more than a riddle and a peace so sharp  it could draw blood, you have to rise from your bench, walk in the woods with no map of where you’re going, and climb into the tomb which turns out to be a chapel, meeting him there, alone. It's here you'll confess a secret or two before acquiescing to lose your head. Only then will it be given back to you as if it were a crown, and you'll walk out of there, at last alive and bearing a promise to wear the wound. 

STUTTER If it’s coherence you’re after,  sit tight—it's not coming anytime soon. Even after the starts and stutters, gears spinning like an engine cranked  cold, what you’ll find is some babble, an earnest look  of intention, linear narrative twisted  past recognition.  If we're to make any progress here, progress must be redefined.   So carry on as you were,  and cut us some slack, toddler.  We're slow learners, and some of us  are just now coming around  to what you already know:  that meaning is a jumbled syntax,  and even if you force it out  it never goes away, this ache to say the things too big for you. It’s a lot to ask a little world  to articulate itself, and our best hope is that love will untangle it enough  to know what we're getting at before saying it back the way it was supposed to sound.

HUNTING FOR AN ANSWER If you’re tracking the ol’ one- and- done, the catch-a-falling-star- and-put-it-in-your-pocket, the snap- it-in-a-locket-and-never-let-it-go,  you’ll be glad to know you’re not alone.  You’ll be even more relieved  with the present company  when you look around and see  a whole troop of us trudging back to camp,  loaded down with a respectable haul of queries but not a single quarry in our nets,  and you yourself with nothing definitive to offer, at least not with any meat on it .  Despite the rhetoric raining down from the the mouths of the Big Chiefs about ............ there’s a small contingent of us— feel free to join, though we’re not the most popular bunch—growing ever more enamored with the alternate approach of our gathering  ancestors, those meek kneelers groveling in the dirt and waiting for their needed sustenance  to be delivered into their open hands on its own, slow time.  It meant admitting they were too slow  to catch it, and further, that soon

SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON NEARING THIRTY Once has been devoured by the while,  and what’s coming feels more real  than the already-is. Memory  lost its memory and escaped the nursing home, nursing  its wounded way home and babbling under its breath how we got it all  wrong. Of course, none of this  makes any sense from where we stand, but it can’t hurt to occasionally call to the stand for questioning our questionable  sense of the sensical. The more muddled things get the more clarity goes down like cool water, but when you're delirious from thirty meandering years the darndest things seem clear as the mirage we're making for, or is it leaving behind, and is it even worth our time to parcel out which is which?

FIRST DAY HOME It’s just that yesterday, before we brought her sister home,  she was a different person  or I was a different person,  but however you spin it  it was a quick-rinse cycle and something doesn't fit the same .  It’s nothing like regret,  it’s just that today, holding  her sister, I can just remember  what our life was like before  a second, but I can also feel that memory growing restless  and looking for a little apartment  somewhere far enough away where we can only visit occasionally.  Remember how we couldn’t  remember what we used to do  on Saturday’s when it was just  the two of us, though there were  literally hundreds of Saturdays  with just the two of us?  It’s just that, as you put it,  everything’s such a stage,  and at this stage we’re both the players  and the audience, the curtain  perpetually opening as we tangle  in the costume-closet, rushing  to ready ourselves for the newest role  of ourselves, if only to find it— already—a bit tight.

STRAIGHT TALK  No really, the wanting never goes  away. Not after the house or the land,  the bigger house on more land or the smaller house with more  landable utility bills and a yard you could cut ten-minutes tops.  Not after filling your empty corners with children or surviving twenty years with children until they graduate and vacate whatever size emptiness,  their voices echoing in the corners  you now have back to yourself.  Not after you cut the cord and source your food from local farmers,  or acquire better, faster cords and a taste for more exotic cuisine.  Not after the more lucrative job to pay for  the children who are always wanting, or the cut in hours to recover  the time you are always wanting  to spend on yourself or the children.  No really, you’re stuck with her like an arranged marriage  and have been from the jump, and like an arranged marriage  your options are limited:  hold your nose and wish her away, which is a kind of wanting itself,   or choose to get over

  WAITING ON EDEN True to her namesake, Eden  is testing our patience and taking her time.  Contractions are present and plenty  painful, but not yet  drawn close enough to merit grabbing the go-bag .  To keep us busy, Em and I  drop seeds into egg crates,  tucking them in with  a soft press of our pinkies, then go outside despite  the February chill to row the soil for Spring. I try to tell her what's about to happen, but she's only two and my words are stuck gestating in the dark of inner rooms and come out looking differently than I'd imagined them. What I wanted to say is that they're slow, these preparatory  labors. For all we know  we may still be here  come nightfall, seeding, shaping,  hoeing, weeding, waiting.